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Carpenter Wanted To Kill What He Created

Everything in Halloween III screams, “Stop it! Stop it now!” Which the film actually physically ends on through the character of Dr. Challis. The annoying commercials that are all the same obviously imply that if you’ve seen one then you’ve seen them all. Candidly implying the same for the slasher genre as a whole. In Harris’ article he has Carol Clover stating this same point for the slasher genre, especially the overflow of sequels. Yet, what is interesting is that for a genre that has such “absence of threshold” (Harris, 101) they provide such stability through the reoccurrence of familiar narrative patterns. It complicates that elements like style of the narrative by never showing instability to the monsters in the orders of life. “They transcend the various orders of morality, physical ability, society, etc.

But what made the catalyst, Halloween, separate from the slasher montage to follow it was the ambiguity of Myers. Zinoman in his chapter The Thing In-Between speaks on how Myers was the first character who felt no remorse or even emotion to killing (Zinoman, 181). Like Carpenter is famous for doing, he engineered a killer that had no intentions other than to kill. Only once in a person’s life can the viewer be first shocked and awed in this way by the killer. Carpenter made the original slasher killer, all the rest are knock offs.